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Job Losses in New York City Since 9/11 Continue to Grow

The national recession and the attack on the World Trade Center cost New York City 47,000 more jobs than previously believed, bringing the city's total job losses to about 223,000 in the last two years, according to new data released yesterday.

The State Department of Labor, which released the revised job loss figures, also reported that the unemployment rate in the city edged up in January, to 8.6 percent from 8.5 percent in December.

The increase was not large, but contrasted to the trend in the rest of the state and the nation, where the average jobless rate fell three-tenths of a percentage point in January. Nationally, the unemployment rate averaged 5.7 percent that month; in New York State excluding the city, the rate was 4.7 percent.

''We're weaker than the nation,'' said James P. Brown, who analyzes the city's economy for the State Labor Department. And given the kind of industries that dominate the city's economy, including Wall Street, Madison Avenue and business services, he added, ''we will continue to lag until there is a noticeable improvement in the national economy.''

The Labor Department compiles its jobs data from a monthly survey of 18,000 businesses across the state. Once a year, it compares the results of its monthly survey with data it receives from business tax returns.

In years when the economy is strong, the revisions usually show that more jobs were created than the department's survey shows; in years when the economy is weak, the losses are usually greater than the survey originally indicated.

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The effects of the World Trade Center attack were particularly hard for the survey to measure, said James Parrott, the chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research group. ''The nature of the survey is that it always misses what's going on in smaller firms,'' he said, ''and 9/11 had a disproportionate impact on small firms.''

But the new jobs data also show that the economy had begun to stall even before the effects of the attack were felt. There were also larger-than-expected job losses in the second half of last year.

One possible bright spot in the Labor Department's report was that in January, the number of jobs fell less sharply than in 2002 (employment typically falls in January as stores and restaurants lay off holiday help and corporations cut employees to meet budget goals).

In fact, after adjusting for those seasonal factors, the number of jobs in the city may have actually risen, said Barbara Byrne Denham, the chief economist for an economic newsletter called The New York Stat.

The current downturn may seem especially harsh because it was preceded by a boom, whereas the economy was anemic for several years before the city's last recession began in 1989, said Jason Bram, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That recession cost the city about 300,000 jobs, he said, adding, ''Hopefully, we won't get there.''

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A version of this article appears in print on March 14, 2003, on Page B00003 of the National edition with the headline: Job Losses in New York City Since 9/11 Continue to Grow. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe